Pass my Trash Pile By

I'm cleaning out a bunch of books I had in storage. The carpenter ants got to a lot of them and chewed them up to the point where they have to be thrown out.

I had no idea carpenter ants ate books. I thought they were harmless. By the good Lord's grace, most of the books I actually cared about were spared.

There are trashpickers in this neighborhood, and whenever I put stuff on the pile, they come out and root through it. Shameless peasants. It's annoying, because they leave stuff strewn all over the pile. And what if I make a mistake and leave something in the box that could be used for identity theft? Or what if I want to throw something out that's none of the trashpickers' damn business?

Sometimes just to be a jerk, I have poured dishwashing liquid inside a box or junk before taping it up and throwing it out. But I quit because I realized there was no way to teach all the trashpickers a lesson. I'd annoy one of them at a time, but as a group, they would learn nothing.

I think today will be a bad day for them. They'll be looking for dishes and tools and so on, and instead they'll get Mathematical Methods of Physics, by Walker and Mathews. And Quantum Mechanics, by Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and company. And a couple of VAX manuals. And a whole bunch of Dover books on Fourier series and numerical methods and so on. If they had the brains to understand any of that stuff, they wouldn't be digging in other people's trash.

I can't believe how much textbooks cost now. No wonder academics are all liberal. Liberals want to spend more money on education, and academics are greedy bastards who want more money. You can't tell me a copy of Mathematical Methods of Physics I bought for fifty-five bucks should cost over a hundred today. But it does. And the Cohen-Tannoudji set I had to toss goes for almost $200.

I'll miss the books that got eaten, but the truth is, I would never have used them again.

The ants like some books more than others, maybe because the glue tastes better. I didn't save a single one of my Problem Solvers editions.

Here's a lesson. If you have to store books, wrap them in plastic and keep humidity away from them. If you can't do that, you're screwed. Believe me, I know.

It's funny, after ten years, my physics and math books still have sentimental value to me. But I threw my law books out and didn't feel a twinge of regret. I guess that's because I'm much prouder of my physics degree than my law degree. Any boob can be a lawyer. You have to be smart to be a top-flight lawyer, but you can be a dumbass and still get rich.